I will rebuke your descendants, and I will throw shit on your faces—the shit of your festival offerings—and you will be carried off to the shitpile along with it.
— Malachi 2:3
Translations of the Bible are often too nice, so much so that the real meaning gets lost. The fact is, the Bible confronts us with the good, the bad, and the ugly and challenges us to wrestle with all of it. Instead of being afraid of this, we ought to embrace it. It’s one of the things that makes the Bible such great literature.
This verse is one of those places where we need some grit in order to really capture the sense. Because God in the book of Malachi is livid. And what do we do when we’re that angry? We yell. We cuss. We say things for shock value that maybe we really mean and maybe we’ll regret later. (Or maybe both.) The Bible gives us a God that is a lot like us, one to whom we can easily relate in spite of the distance.
Why is God so ticked off?
Israel’s leaders have let God down, and probably also the people they are meant to lead. In this case, the leaders in question happen to be priests, whose job involves managing the system of animal sacrifice. They have not done that job appropriately. They are keeping up appearances, but underneath it all they are cheating.
Now, this may seem trivial to us. Our religious, economic, and political lives do not revolve around animal sacrifice. But it is important to bear in mind that, in ancient Israel, priests were political leaders. Sometimes they served alongside a king or a governor, other times they sought political power for themselves. We live in a very different kind of society. Democracy did not exist or was only just getting started in ancient Greece when this text was written. Still, it is not hard for us to see the problems that arise when our leaders do not do their jobs. When they treat our laws and its customs with disdain, as something to be manipulated for their own benefit while maintaining a pretense of piety and patriotism.
Sacrifice is just the tip of the iceberg.
Sacrifice in the book of Malachi actually signals a whole array of much more profound offenses that come up later in the book. We often work this way when we’re angry, right? Start with the small stuff and, as we’re venting our anger, eventually the real problem comes out.
So what’s the real problem? These priests were also responsible for teaching and interpreting torah, or instruction from God.1 But they’ve done this in a way that makes the Israelites stumble. Perhaps they have set a bad example that others follow, making corruption socially acceptable. Perhaps they have caused tangible harm to others. Malachi describes their offenses in detail: they have shown partiality, committed adultery, lied, cheated workers of their wages, and oppressed the poorest and most vulnerable in society—the widow, the orphan, and the immigrant. To top it off, they’re passing this evil off as though it were good and would meet with God’s approval. They have effectively defrauded God and, at least so far, gotten away with it.2
Sometimes it’s important to be shocking.
No wonder God is mad. God expresses God’s anger in a way that will hit home for the priestly audience of this text. “I will throw shit on your faces—the shit of your festival offerings.” This imagery comes from the instructions for proper animal sacrifice. When the priests prepare a bull for slaughter, they are supposed to take the meat that is not appropriate for cooking, the hide, and the dung that was still in the animal’s system when it was butchered, cart it outside the community, and burn it.3
In effect, God says to these priests: Your actions have produced nothing but shit in Israelite society, and I’m going to rub your face in it so that you may be carried out to the refuse pile along with it. The language is shocking and disgusting on purpose, to force everyone listening to understand just how bad this really is—not by explaining it in a nice, straightforward, rational way (as though that will make any difference), but by reaching us viscerally so that we have no choice but to sit up and pay attention.
This is the kind of message we miss when try to clean up the Bible, when we make it conform it to an image we have of it rather than follow it to the uncomfortable places it can sometimes take us. Malachi is a real “have a good, long, hard look in the mirror” sort of text. Although the society it portrays is foreign to us in many ways, its problems are not all that unfamiliar. Perhaps its swift kick in the gut is just what we need.
Featured image: Julius Schnorr von Carolsfield, Aaron’s Rod Budded and Blossomed (1860). Wikimedia Commons.
